NOT FOR WHITE AUDIENCES And Chapmyn wasn't even one of the top grossers. "The guy that did 'Beauty Shop' probably grossed fifteen to twenty-five million dollars in the Chitlin Circuit," he says. "These plays make enormous money." Chapmyn is a blunt-featured, odd-shaped man, with a bullet head and a Buddha belly. He's thirty-six, and he grew up in Kan- sas, the son of a Baptist minister. He tells me that he fell out with his father in his early twentIes. "He was adamant in teach- ing us to stand up for who we are, and who I am happens to be a black gay man. He taught me to tell the truth," Chapmyn says, but adds that his father changed his mind when his son came out. "I just wish you had lied," the minister told his son. A result- ing disaffection with the church-and a spell as a homeless person-impelled him to write a play for which he has become widely known: "Our Young Black Men Are Dying and Nobody Seems to Care." HIs experience with the Chitlin Circuit was decidedly mixed but still memorable. Chapmyn, like everyone else who has succeeded on the Chitlin Circuit, had to master the dark arts of marketing and promotIon; and to do so while bypassing the major media. He genially explains the ground rules: "What has happened in America is that you have a very active Mrican-American theatre audience that doesn't get their information from the arts section in the newspaper; that doesn't read reviews but listens to the radio, gets things stuffed in their bulletins in church, has fly- ers put on their car when they're night- clubbing. That's how people get to know about black theatre. Buying the arts sec- tion ain't going to cut it for us. That au- dience is not interested in the 'black the- atre,' and the black-theatre audience is not interested in reading that information. We use radio quite extensively, because in our community and places we've gone Mrican-Americans listen to radio. In fact, there's kind of an unspoken rule on the Chitlin Circuit: if a city doesn't have a black radio station, then the Chitlin Cir- cuit won't perform there." But the Chitlin Circuit has a less ami- able side; indeed, to judge from some of the tales you hear, many of its most dra- matIc events occur offstage. The inner- ci ty version of foundation program offi- cers are drug dealers With money to burn, and their influence is unmistakable "They do everything in cash," Chapmyn says. "At our highest point, I know that after we all got our money, we were still col- lecting in the neighborhood of a hundred ""' ,"<>...., ;. .... (: f. >> "$;..M$: w V' 53 "" P \, && f':\F" " _1 " W LWÞ\- 'They tell me I have a firm consistency and a mild flavor. How about you?" . thousand dollars a week. That was cash being given to us, usually in envelopes, by people we didn't know. It was scary." He continues, 'When I was in that circuit, I dealt with a lot of people who didn't have anything but beeper numbers, who would call me with hotel numbers, who operated through post-office boxes, who would show up at the time of the show-and most of the time take care of me and my people very well." Not always, though. "In one city, I think we did three shows, and the receipts after expenses were a hundred and forty thousand dollars," Chapmyn recounts. "My percentage of that was to be sixty- five thousand dollars. I remember the people gave me five thousand and told me that if I wanted the rest I'd have to sue them" He ended up spending the night in jail. "I was so mad I was ready to hurt somebody," he explains. "Somebody is going to tell me that they got my sixty thousand dollars and they ain't going to give it to me? I think I flipped a table over and hit somebody in the face." Larry Leon Hamlin, too, becomes ani- mated when he talks about the sleazy world of popular theatre. "Contracts have been put out on people," he tells me. "If you are a big-time drug dealer, it's like, 'These plays are making money, and I've got . money. I'm going to put out a play.' That drug dealer will write a play who has never written a play before, will direct the play, who has never directed a play before. They get deep with guns." James Chap- myn says he dropped out of the circuit because of the criminal element: "Here I am doing a play about all the things kill- ing Mrican-American men, chief among those things being the violence and the drugs, and I'm doing business with people who are probably using the money they make from drugs to promote my play. I had a fundamental problem with that." Chapmyn, plainly, is a man with a mis- sion of uplift. By contrast, many other stars of the Chitlin Circuit have the more single-minded intent of pleasing an audi- ence: they stoop to conquer. T HAT might be said, certainly, of the most successful impresario of the Chitlin Circuit, a man named Shelly Gar- rett. Garrett maintains that his play "Beauty Shop" has been seen by more than twenty million people; that it's the most success- ful black stage play in American history; and that he himself is "America's No.1 black theatrical producer, director, and playwright." Shelly Garrett has never met August Wilson; August Wilson has never heard of Shelly Garrett. They are as un-